On the page, Damian Barr’s 2013 memoir is subtle and seductive. His coming-of-age tale is like a Scottish version of The End of Eddy by the French novelist Édouard Louis; two first-person accounts of growing up gay and working-class in the declining industrial hinterlands of the late 20th century. Both authors present themselves as bright and sensitive, ill equipped to deal with the domestic violence, homophobia and bullying that besets them.
Just as Louis understands his life in terms of political choices, Barr sees an equivalence between the end of steel-making at Ravenscraig in North Lanarkshire, the iniquities of the government’s homophobic section 28 legislation and the messianic individualism of prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Each is an expression of cruelty.
The television is the only escape, which is why designer Kenneth MacLeod scatters screens across his set for this National Theatre of Scotland production, much as designers of The End of Eddy have done before him.
But where this is implicit in print, it becomes thumpingly explicit in Barr’s own adaptation, written with James Ley. Freeing themselves from a literal version of the book, the playwrights frame the story from the perspective of a grownup author (Gary Lamont) who is struggling to find the words to express the traumas of his childhood. Maggie & Me emerges from a therapy session in which the writer comes face to face with his childhood self (Sam Angell) and editorialises about what it all means.
On the plus side, the approach allows for a variety of storytelling techniques, from karaoke sessions to TV quizshows, while, with a nod to Angels in America, Thatcher (Beth Marshall) stalks the stage like an untamed monster. On the down side, it sentimentalises those aspects of the book that were raw and understated. It turns a delicate account of a brutal upbringing into a soppy play about a man with writer’s block.
There are flashes of the ribald humour Ley brought to plays such as Ode to Joy and Wilf, but any freedom in the writing is weighed down by a cumbersome set in an overlong production by Suba Das. After the writers have turned the book inside out, Das hems it in again with a staging that is clunky and tonally uncertain.
